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In my last post I showed how release dates are not a good way of inferring version bounds. The package repository should not make assumptions about what versions you have tested against. You need to tell it. But from what I've seen there are two problems with specifying version bounds:
Lack of knowledge about how to specify proper boundsUnwillingness to take the time to do so
Early in my Haskell days, the first time I wrote a cabal file I distinctly remember getting to the dependencies section and having no idea what to put for the version bounds. So I just ignored them and moved on. The result of that decision is that I can no longer build that app today. I would really like to, but it's just not worth the effort to try.
It wasn't until much later that I learned about the PVP and how to properly set bounds. But even then, there was still an obstacle. It can take some time to add appropriate version bounds to all of a package's dependencies. So even if you k…

In past debates about Haskell's Package Versioning Policy (PVP), some have suggested that package developers don't need to put upper bounds on their version constraints because those bounds can be inferred by looking at what versions were available on the date the package was uploaded. This strategy cannot work in practice, and here's why.
Imagine someone creates a small new package called foo. It's a simple package, say something along the lines of the formattable package that I recently released. One of the dependencies for foo is errors, a popular package supplying frequently used error handling infrastructure. The developer happens to already have errors-1.4.7 installed on their system, so this new package gets built against that version. The author uploads it to hackage on August 16, 2015 with no upper bounds on its dependencies. Let's for simplicity imagine that errors is the only dependency, so the .cabal file looks like this:
name: foo
build-depend…